Attackerman Guestblogging

Dear all,

I'll be guestblogging this week, along with a cast of other smarter people, over at Spencer Ackerman's Attackerman blog this week. 

My first post is on whether or not the new literature of counterinsurgency is becoming too practicioner-focused, and asks more questions than it answers. I think you'll like it. 

Your Daily Read

1. Google's Geospatial Ethnographic Data FAIL

2. The best thing you'll read about the challenges of being a soldier in Afghanistan you'll read this month (H/T Ghosts of Alexander)

The Great Bird of the Galaxy

Over at Attackerman, Spencer's lamenting the failure of X-Men 3 to properly take advantage of the Dark Phoenix Saga source material:

If comic books are megalomaniacal escapism, we should all want to be Jean Grey. Wolverine is better at slicing people to pieces. Jean destroys entire star systems; destabilizes intergalactic empires; compels acoyltes of mystical tyrants to clone her; makes men leave their wives for her (especially when they marry her clones); dies and comes back to life endlessly; jumps out of Jamaica Bay with her hair totally dry. All hypothetical battle plans for defeating the X-Men require gaming out how to neutralize Jean. 

Men: you should want to be Jean Grey. And as I was just saying to Dave Weigel, what a crying shame that X-Men 3 booted a chance to tell the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga.

I think part of the problem here is that the whole Phoenix/Dark Phoenix Saga falls apart when subjected to the sort of near-future realism that all superhero movies seem to have adopted nowadays. After all, when the synopsis of the plot (SPOILER WARNING) essentially is: "ONE DAY IN SPACE, bad things happen and the X-Men need to fly back to Earth quickly. Jean Grey out of nowhere learns how to pilot a space shuttle, and so volunteers to fly everyone else home and get zapped with cosmic rays, which contrary to previous Fantastic Four continuity realistically and quickly just straight up KILL her. 

Then she becomes a SPACE BIRD.

Said Space Bird is in fact a primeval force of nature to these aliens with perpendicular mohawks - by the way, Cyclops' dad shows up FROM THE DEAD, but this is passed over in about ten seconds - and they need the Space Bird to fix the M'Guffin Krystal. They fix it and all is well, and return to earth, where things are boring for a while. Then Jean goes to the Yale Club of New York and gets mesmerized by Jack Sparrow, Wolverine jumps out of the sewer and into the plot of Die Hard, and Jean turns evil again.

Then the Space Bird EATS A SUN. Then Jean gets better, and buys a mask and a go-go skirt. Time passes. The perpendicular mohawk aliens flip out and put Jean on trial. Luckily, Charles Xavier, space lawyer, finds a way to turn it into a trial by combat, in which the fate of the universe will be decided by an unauthorized X-Men vs. JLA crossover event. Distraught by the thought of the JLA winning, Jean Grey suicides instead of becoming the Evil Space Bird again. THE END."

(And then it gets worse.) I mean, the story swerves back and forth over the realism line like ten times a second; it's an amazing story, but it doesn't fit into a world of black leather biker jackets. It's much more high science fiction than anything else, and it would completely break the budget. Unlike Watchmen, it doesn't even pretend at realism. It is beautiful escapism, but importantly, that's not what superhero movies are about nowadays. As a response to 9/11, superhero movies changed tone dramatically. Instead of elevating us, they drag our modern mythology down to street level. This, by the way, is part of why only Batman and Spiderman movies really work at all, and why the low-science-fiction installments (The Dark Knight and Spiderman 1 and 2) are far more popular than the heavy-SF installments (Batman Begins and Spiderman 3).